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Sunday, 31 May 2015

Housekeeping

Brian, we/you have E.P. Taylor under 1978 in "the read" and 1982 in "the collection." What will future scholars think? And speaking of the collection, does Arctic Imperative feature the most haphazard paperback cover ever published? Did someone in the art department at M&S hate Richard Rohmer? And speaking of paperbacks and skulduggery, how come your old friends didn't know that the best of the Dusty Bookcase will soon be available in book form? We have to find out from the internet?

5 comments:

If I glance to the right at the cover and erase the words, what are those pictures telling me? That it should be called THE PIPELINE TO NOWHERE? Men in the North like to work, even if they don't know where the pipeline goes?

At least the bottom photograph is recognizably a pipeline. What's going on in the top photograph? And what does the typeface suggest? And why isn't the subtitle in the same typeface? Why are the photographs two different sizes? Do they suggest that the system is urgently working or urgently not working? And where's Patton?

I'm fairly certain that The Arctic Imperative were signed by Columbia along with The Perth County Conspiracy. And that the same font was used on their debut album.

Hippies.

Everything from fonts to photos suggests incompetence. A pipeline points skyward. And what's that going on above the title? An accident? Something is on fire. Two men stand, backs turned, seemingly oblivious. It's probably okay, but this is how it looks to the layperson. Accident or not, those guys standing around hardly match Rohmer's sense of urgency.

The tanker would be a cool image on a cover. Or a pipeline running into the snowy infinite. Or a line of cars waiting for fuel. Or frozen corpses of a family sitting around a breakfast table, dead from lack of heating oil and natural gas. Or a maple leaf on fire. Or a hardhat in the snow. Or a hardhat on fire. Jesus, something. This looks like a prop book from King of Kensington. (King gets it at the library when he's sick of his 19-year-old wife and dreams of moving up north...) Still not as ugly as Patton's Gap, though.